Hey JokerHart,
In this case, the needs are correct. There are six tiers to dominant vs recessive needs in our game. In the case of a circus/harlequin hybrid, the circus breeds clown compatibility states "Recessive trait: Will dominate all other recessive traits," while the harlequin's clown compatibility only says "Recessive trait," which means you take the need from the Circus breed page.
As far as needing to select the breed twice. I fully agree with you, it was my plan to fix this before the last update, but after we found several game-breaking bugs, we decided to prioritize fixing those and pushing the update ASAP over the handful of quality of life updates we wanted to include. They will be added in 1.0.2.